billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 7, 2015

Before I start, if you're not already aware, my first full-length fantasy novel called To Kill A Dragon just dropped on Amazon - so if you're interested, I'd really appreciate if you took a look, the link's in the description below, maybe pick up a copy to drop a review. After all, if I dish it out, I need to be able to take it too.

...You see, Drake? What I did there just now is called 'marketing', and while it's on a far smaller scale and will probably lead to a far smaller return, I'd argue I didn't screw it up nearly as badly as you screwed up this week.

video review: 'pentatonix' by pentatonix

Well, better late than never. And I figured since so many of you were asking, I might as well.

Next up, Billboard BREAKDOWN before I talk about Carrie Underwood, Joanna Newsom, Neon Indian, and a fair few more. Stay tuned!

album review: 'pentatonix' by pentatonix

I was hesitant about covering this album. And no, not just because covering fellow YouTubers always makes me feel a bit awkward - although you could argue that most acts starting these days can present themselves as YouTubers if they do enough vlogs. And it's not that YouTubers can't transition to making very respectable music - there are plenty of examples that proves that misguided assumption false, look at Lindsey Stirling. 

No, my concern was rooted in something a little more universal, with the closest analogue being when the one big hit of a one-hit wonder is a cover... because eventually you have to start writing your own songs, define a unique musical identity. It was one of the biggest stumbling blocks that hit Karmin with their major label debut, and deep down I was dreading that happening here with Pentatonix, the five person singing group that became a YouTube powerhouse with a capella arrangements and covers of popular songs. Now I'll admit to not being a huge fan of Pentatonix - I liked a lot of their covers, they had unique personality, but they were never really a group I found as more than a curiosity... but maybe that was being unfair, because they had always included a few original tracks across their albums and the five-person a cappella presentation guaranteed they'd have that unique personality that so many one-hit wonders have lacked - hell, they've already won a Grammy for it! And besides, if you cover so much material, you've bound to pick up some tricks from the best in terms of melodic composition and writing, so I did have hope this would come together - after all, I wouldn't have gotten this many requests if this wasn't a good project, right? So I checked out the self-titled album from Pentatonix - were all of my fears unfounded?

video review: 'fading frontier' by deerhunter

I wanted to like this album a lot more than I did, but eh, it happens. Definitely an accessible release, but I'm not sure how well it overall came together, especially considering how Deerhunter has retread these themes in the past.

Anyway, next up... honestly, I was planning on using this week to catch up on some indie stuff, but I keep getting so many requests for Pentatonix... hmm, we'll see. Stay tuned!

video review: '35 mph town' by toby keith

And so this happened. Goddamn, I really used to like this guy, shame how much his material has gotten this lazy.

Ah well, not sure what's next, but my first book To Kill A Dragon has just dropped on Amazon! Buy it, give it a read/review, and I'd be thrilled! Link here: http://www.amazon.com/To-Kill-Dragon-Mark-Grondin-ebook/dp/B016X1V2J2

album review: '35 mph town' by toby keith

I'm starting to think Toby Keith might have a problem.

And no, it has nothing to do with the asinine feud with the Dixie Chicks that was around a decade ago or any assumptions of political allegiance that lack basis in fact or the drunken concert incidents that would be a black mark on his career if it wasn't for the dozens of songs he's written about booze. No, this is a larger issue tied to his music: namely, its relevance.

See, as much as Toby Keith has criticized bro-country for its inability to take anything seriously or get political or real, it's hard not to look at the success Toby Keith has had in recent years and ignore the hypocrisy. As much as I might like Toby Keith - the guy has a lot of charisma, a ton of range as a performer both comedic and dramatic, and a knack for writing great hooks - it's hard for me to not look at his past few albums and see some of the laziness. This is his eighteenth album in twenty-two years, and at this point the sheer amount of filler and bad songs are starting to pile up and obscure the true gems. And look, I liked most of Drinks After Work when I reviewed it in 2013, but in retrospect outside of certain moments it was forgettable. And the frustrating fact is that I get the uncanny feeling Toby Keith knows that and just doesn't care like before. It's not like he's under any sort of pressure - he's on his own label and probably enough royalty money to easily coast, and for the life of me I have no idea what's inspiring him right now. He tried to get his daughter Krystal's career off the ground with an album he produced, but that went nowhere and I think I was one of the few people who cared enough to review it.

So maybe it's a good thing he's now working with Shane McAnally and Brandy Clark on his newest album, two songwriters I actually like and respect and the latter who dropped one of the best country albums of the 2010s thus far, at least for his leadoff single. I had hopes his newest album 35 MPH Town would at least be passable - did Toby Keith pull it off?

video review: 'sounds good, feels good' by 5 seconds of summer

Well, this happened. Can't say I dug it all that much, hoped for more artistic progression, but I think they'll get there eventually.

Next up, I think I might as well bang out this Toby Keith review. Stay tuned!

album review: 'sounds good, feels good' by 5 seconds of summer

I almost feel obliged to talk about 5 Seconds Of Summer at this point.

See, the more I hear their singles and look at their cowriters, the more I'm seeing a group that's at least trying to head in a more interesting direction in revitalizing the pop rock and pop punk of the late 90s and early 2000s, which stands in stark contrast to everything else on modern pop radio. When I originally covered their debut EP, I didn't see much beyond a middling act who was playing to younger audiences who didn't otherwise grow up with Sum 41 or Blink-182 or Green Day or The Offspring in the same way, but their self-titled debut album did have some promise. I figured if they went with rougher production, brought some of their real instrumental chops to the forefront, and maybe tightened up the writing a bit, they'd have a shot at some staying power.

And going into this record, I had every reason to believe that was happening. Yeah, the lineage to previous mainstream-accessible pop rock and pop punk bands was pretty obvious and you could definitely argue they weren't reinventing the formula or rising above their forebears, but they weren't bad successors. And to further give them credit, they were working with songwriters from All Time Low and Good Charlotte and even Evanescence, all of which gave me the impression that if the band took the opportunity to get rougher instrumentation, they might pick up some darker subject matter along the way - hell, 'Jet Black Heart' seemed to indicate they were taking some cues from mid-2000s emo, at the very least. In other words, I was hoping this would at least be an improvement on their debut, rock a little harder - was I right?

video review: 'astoria' by marianas trench

Man, this review was so satisfying to do. Such a great band, they definitely deserve more recognition.

Anyway, next up... hmm, I've already got a review filmed and I just need to polish up editing, but I think I have the perfect idea for a follow-up here...

album review: 'astoria' by marianas trench

This is one of the big ones, folks. This is one of the albums I've been looking forward to all year, from a Canadian pop rock band that's been quiet too long. A group that may have started with a debut that seemed to come at the tail end of a commercial boom before quietly becoming an absolute powerhouse up here with hit after hit after hit. A group that for no adequately explained reason has ever really crossed into the US even despite having irrepressibly catchy songs, solid production, excellent songwriting, and one hell of a frontman. Why is that?

Honestly, I'm not sure. I'd argue a big factor was distribution - the band's star-making, damn near classic record pop rock Masterpiece Theater didn't hit the US until September of 2010, over eighteen months after it was released in Canada, and while we couldn't get enough of them across 2011 and 2012 with the excellent record Ever After, the US charts were in a profound state of turbulence in the collapse of the club boom, I'm not really blaming them here. Thankfully they got that settled through a deal with Cherrytree and Interscope, but a bigger part of it is that Marianas Trench were a different sort of pop rock act, taking much of Fall Out Boy's theatrical ambitions and writing and marrying it to a far more lean and melodic sound, trading the obnoxiousness for populist cleverness. By their second album they had built a three-act structure for a loose conceptual framework, by their third album they embraced all-out narrative storytelling, and after the EP Something Old/Something New that contained satirical tracks like 'Pop 101', one could think that Josh Ramsay's writing was in danger of disappearing up its own ass. But I wouldn't agree here, and when I heard the loose conceptual framework behind their upcoming record Astoria, instrumentally inspired by 80s fantasy and adventure films, I realized we might have something so damn earnest that it transcends irony or satire and just becomes flat out epic - and that's not a word I ever use lightly. So you can bet I was psyched to hear Astoria - does it live up to my high expectations?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - october 31, 2015 (VIDEO)

And this was surprisingly easy to get done - either I'm getting better at editing or filming these, or positivity just works for me.

Next up... ooh, I've got a good one coming. No, not that one, the other one....

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - october 31, 2015

You know, when I looked at the Billboard Hot 100 charts this morning, I was astounded: because this week scanning through the returning entries and new arrivals, I could find little to complain. Even the songs I didn't like as much weren't so much bad and in a worse week would easily miss the bottom spots, whereas for the best we got a plethora of solid to genuinely great songs. Now I'm not too optimistic to expect this'll last in the long term, but weeks like this always give me a little thrill of hope: maybe the air is shifting as we come into the last weeks of 2015, you never know!

video review: 'confident' by demi lovato

And that's two tonight. Going to crash now, barely conscious. 

Next up, Billboard BREAKDOWN, and then I will hopefully get to talk about one of my favourite ever bands - stay tuned!

video review: 'the documentary 2 / the documentary 2.5' by the game

God, this took so long to finish. Definitely happy with how it turned out, but still... so long.

Next up in hopefully less than an hour, Demi Lovato - stay tuned!

album review: 'confident' by demi lovato

You know, throughout the course of Billboard BREAKDOWN I've come develop an odd dislike for a certain type of pop anthem, the sort that has only gotten more popular in recent years due to the return of sleepy, sanitized easy listening pop: the 'self-esteem anthem'. Now of course the broad concept can work and still have some emotional power: we all have low points and can be inspired by the right tune that pulls our spirits skyward, but there's a key element I've seen missing in so many of these songs that really bothers me: a sense of drama. In the best of cases, you get the feeling that the person who is singing is speaking with real purpose and populism to address a real wrong, or that they themselves have pushed through the crisis and are all the stronger for it. And what's even trickier is that there's no one formula to make it work: sometimes it's in the writing, sometimes the melodic swell, sometimes the expansive production, but most of the time it's in the performance.

And one of the things that tends to annoy me so much about many of these performances is how 'safe' they feel. There's nothing raw or fiery in the delivery, nothing that gets the blood coursing or show that the performer has ever been through the situations that might deserve such an anthemic response. For an easy comparison, let's take two songs from Christina Aguilera, an artist I don't even like: 'Beautiful' and 'Fighter'. Now you can argue that after Mean Girls you can't take 'Beautiful' seriously anymore, but there was a populist fervour to the song that's hard to fake, especially in comparison with far weaker entries like 'Firework' by Katy Perry. And hell, 'Fighter' is just awesome, half because it actually anchored itself in rock guitar and half because Christina sells it with a raw explosive energy that feels believable. Place a song like Rachel Platten's gutless and completely generic 'Fight Song' against it, and you realize a.) what real vocal charisma and power sounds like and b.) wow, Christina really has mismanaged her career over the past decade.

So let's talk about Christina Aguilera's spiritual successor: Demi Lovato, another former Disney starlet with a huge voice that unfortunately makes every song sound like hard work. Now it's taken me a long time to come around on Demi Lovato, because while I liked her 2013 album DEMI for the smarter-than-expected content and some solid hooks, there were way too many structural problems in the rushed composition, by-the-numbers production, and underwritten lyrics to really be excused. But DEMI has always felt like a transitional record to me, a stepping stone to when she's step out as the vibrant, fully-formed pop star that she is. And with the lead-off singles for Confident, I got the impression that Demi had not only grown as a more expressive vocalist, but had picked up the explosive, pop rock-edged instrumentation that's a natural fit for her vocal tone - and since a new Pink or Ke$ha album don't seem likely for the near future, I prayed we'd get something of quality to fill that female-driven pop rock slot that's been vacant on the Hot 100 for too long. Did Confident deliver?

album review: 'the documentary 2 / the documentary 2.5' by the game

Let's talk a little about double albums. Now I've covered a fair few double albums this year, most notably 'Summertime '06' by Vince Staples and 'The Powers That B' by Death Grips. And in both of those cases, I was left feeling that positioning them as double albums might not have been the best decision as they both could be slashed down to tighter single records with less filler - or in the case of Death Grips, they could have just stuck with Jenny Death. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to the double album as a concept - one of my favourite records of all time, Ayreon's The Human Equation, is a prime example - but even Arjen Lucassen struggled with his double album The Diary under The Gentle Storm namee. Yeah, I can appreciate making both a heavy and light version of each track and then encouraging your audience to mix and match, but that could have been a much tighter release.

So when I heard that west coast MC The Game wasn't just releasing a sequel to his critically acclaimed record The Documentary, but structuring it as a double album release called The Documentary 2 and The Documentary 2.5 - yes, I know each disc was released a week apart, but it's a double album, let's be real here - I was seriously worried. Even assuming the best case scenario that each of the hour-plus discs would come together, the odds of this project being just an exhausting endeavor to work through seemed likely. And even though Blood Moon: Year Of The Wolf wasn't apparently a full project from The Game, instead more of a compilation, it was hard to overlook that it was a fragmented mess that had too many guest stars and opted for way too much style over substance.

But then again, maybe I'm being unfair. Many people absolutely loved the song The Game effectively made his own on Dr. Dre's Compton, and considering he was directly positioning these records as sequels to the one that made him huge, I had some hope this could work. Of course, he also brought out all the stops as hip-hop's best networker since Master P, and on this double album we have Kendrick, DeJ Loaf, Ice Cube, Dre, will.i.am, Fergie, Puff Daddy, Ab-Soul, Q-Tip, Future, Kanye West, Drake, Snoop Dogg, Anderson .Paak, Jay Rock, ScHoolboy Q, Nas, Lil Wayne, Scarface, DJ Quik, E-40, Ty Dolla $ign, YG, King Mez, Jon Connor, and Busta Rhymes, and those are the names I immediately recognized... although considering his hype and his Blood affiliation, I'm shocked Young Thug doesn't show up. So I expected this to be an overlong, bloated mess: was I right?

video review: 'halfway' by uncommon nasa

And that was two in one night. Okay, I might need a day off - mostly because these albums from The Game might take a bit of time to clean through. Over two hours... well, we'll see. Stay tuned!

album review: 'halfway' by uncommon nasa

Goddamn it, how does this keep happening? It seems like when it comes to rappers who dropped great albums in the late summer, early autumn of 2014, I'm just late to the party here!

Now to be at least a little fair here, I get the feeling the majority of people were late to the party with Uncommon Nasa. New York MC, a member of The Presence in the late 90s, affiliated with Def Jux and El-P throughout the early 2000s, he founded Uncommon Records and has steadily been cranking out experimental, rough-edged hip-hop albums, either under his name or the alias Adam Warlock. And if you go digging through his featuring credits across the past fifteen or so years, you'll see enough cosigns to respect his credentials as a thoughtful, articulate MC, but what impressed me a lot more was the production. I was reminded a little of Ratking in terms of the unmistakable New York focus, and dense, clattering textures, but Uncommon Nasa was more conceptual in his writing, not quite as blunt and immediate but just as skilled in creating a starkly vivid, gritty picture. It wasn't always easy material to approach - his flows could run a little off-kilter and sometimes the mix could get a little cacophonous for its own good, but with Land of the Way It Is and especially his critically well-received and fascinating 2014 record New York Telephone, he definitely stood as a veteran that it'd be worth keeping an eye on.

As such, when he approached me directly to cover his 2015 album Halfway, I was all the more interested - how did it turn out?

video review: 'unbreakable' by janet jackson

...you happy now?

I kid, really, I actually enjoyed this way more than I was otherwise expecting. But it's not the only review dropping tonight, so stay tuned!

album review: 'unbreakable' by janet jackson

Well... okay, sure, why not?

You know, I'm surprised there was so much demand for me to cover Janet Jackson. I guess I shouldn't be, considering that for a good decade from the mid-80s to the mid-90s, the queen of R&B was cranking out albums that could easily be held up as high points in the genre - and keep in mind her brother Michael was just as active in this period. From the autobiographical Control that saw her seize control of her career to the more political and surprisingly relevant Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814 in 1989 to the more experimental and sexual Janet in 1993, there was a period where Janet Jackson could do no wrong in her blend of incredibly tight pop and R&B. And the amazing thing is that these albums hold up - yeah, there are some synth tones and drum effects that sound dated, but not nearly as many as I was expecting.

But then R&B faded away from prominence in the late 90s and by the time it came back in the 2000s, Janet Jackson was still charting hits, but the critical acclaim wasn't coming the way it used to... mostly because the albums were of middling quality at best. The records were getting raunchier and that does work for a certain thrill, but at some point it just started feeling overdone and repetitive. It didn't help her career took a body blow thanks to that Super Bowl performance - of which the reaction was way blown out of proportion and says way more about puritanical American culture than anything else - and her albums throughout the latter half of the 2000s seemed all the more desperate to retake the spotlight. But by then R&B was fading out in favour of pop again and in 2009, the brother who had always hung over Janet's career in the eyes of the public died tragically, so Janet took a break from recording new music. Instead, she did some work for film, stage, and philanthropy, got a divorce and remarried, and only returned with a new album released on her own label this year.

And to some extent I had no idea what to expect. For as influential as Janet has been throughout the course of her career, modern R&B is a very different place than it was in the 80s or 90s or even 2000s, and I was concerned how her breathy vocals had managed to last under the wear of over thirty years in the industry. But when I heard 'No Sleeep', the lead-off single for this album, I had every reason to believe there'd be quality here - and frankly, it's only been my insane schedule that's prevented me from covering this sooner. So how is Unbreakable?